I’m an easy mark when it comes to pomp and circumstance, so like millions worldwide, I just finished watching the Royal Wedding. An impressive occasion, to say the least. Now, I need to relax and get over my Royal Wedding media hangover.

The media frenzy surrounding the wedding is likely to remain at a fever pitch far into the future however, as will the level of cyber criminal activity hooked on to Prince William and Kate Middleton. Hardly surprising, when one considers the size of the “market”. Scoping out “the royal wedding” on Google returns an amazing 53 Million search results – and cyber crooks love a big market.

Cyber crooks don’t miss a trick when it comes to leveraging events surrounding popular personalities, and along with the usual schemes – inbox spam, phony search results, Twitter and Facebook misdirection …….., – Kate Middleton comment spam, as illustrated by the following examples posted here in the last few days, has not been neglected by these parasites.

Clicking on the link leads to a 90 MB compressed download hosted at Easy Share. I have no doubt that downloading this file would lead to a very painful experience.

The second:

This is actually my personal complete nude and semi-nude picture collection of Kate Middleton I collected over the last 10 weeks. http://www.megaupload.com/?d=8KKIJIWT Caution: Don’t leak this pack outside of this website or I will eliminate this comment and also chase you down to hell!

Download and view this entire pic series of Kate Middleton along with pretty much all the unclothed as well as naughty images one can locate on the world wide web. http://www.fileserve.com/file/xnj2k2Q Caution: Don’t leak this pack outside of this site or I will delete this post and hunt you down to hell!

A similar set up – clicking on the link leads to a 90 MB compressed download.

If you’ve ever wondered why comments on this site, and many other sites for that matter, are held for moderation by a site administrator, the simple answer is – comment spam, as illustrated, can be extremely dangerous.

The amount of time required to effectively control comment spam is not insignificant. For example, since I first setup this site, I’ve dealt with over 55,000 spam comments.

Conservatively, it takes 10 seconds to check each spam comment (spam filters are not perfect) – that amounts to 152 hours, or 4 plus weeks, of wasted time. Needless to say – I consider comment spammers to be far down on the human evolutionary scale.

Same old – same old:

Be cautious when following links contained in comments on any web site.

Be particularly cautious of comments, on any web site, where the writer is describing a problem with recommended software and offers a link to alternative software. This is a favorite technique employed by cyber-criminals.

Be cautious when following any link contained in any web site, since the latest reports indicate there are 5.8 million individual web pages infected across 640,000 compromised websites. Cyber-criminals are finding it easier than ever to inject malicious content into legitimate sites.

Be cautious following links on web forums. Forums can often be a source of dangerous links.

Since the majority of infected sites are infected with Java based scripts, consider using Firefox with the NoScript add-on active. NoScript offers superior protection.

Install an Internet Browser add-on that provides protection against questionable or unsafe websites. My personal favorite is Web of Trust, an Internet Explorer/Firefox add-on, that offers substantial protection against questionable, or unsafe websites.

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